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Top 5 Ways the Cisco Nexus Switches will Revolutionize the Datacenter
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.png "Christopher Stacy")
For some time now, Cisco has been focusing on the datacenter environment as the way of the future. Within recent years, many companies have seen a move from the traditional configuration of maintaining an array of servers in each of many office branches to a more consolidated approach utilizing high performance and high availability datacenters to host most, if not all, critical services. In these times of economic uncertainty, many companies have been able to drastically reduce IT expenditure while still maintaining, and in many cases even improving, application performance and availability. This consolidation not only reduces the physical number of systems required to provide needed services, but also simplifies management and maintenance considerably.
This benefit is not limited to large enterprises however. As large amounts of bandwidth become cheaper and more available for small and midsize businesses, the value of a datacenter facility rapidly increases. As more and more organizations begin to reap these benefits and as datacenter infrastructure becomes more widespread, there will inevitably be a call for network infrastructure which is specifically designed to help take advantage of the datacenter environment, and further consolidate and simplify IT infrastructure. The Cisco Nexus series switches are the first of this new breed of Cisco technologies.
I recently had the good fortune of attending a Cisco training class covering the Nexus series switches currently in production. It did not take long to realize that the Nexus is not just another switching platform; it is something different entirely. It is the first step in a metamorphosis of the datacenter into a fully integrated, fully virtualized environment that is capable of providing more services than ever before, doing so faster than ever before and, most notably, doing so with less hardware and at a lower cost.
The Nexus platform is in many ways an entirely new concept in network infrastructure. At its core, it is a state of the art switching platform customized for the datacenter environment; however, it also represents a paradigm shift in the way enterprise networks are designed.
This is first in a series of articles, describing the top 5 ways in which the Nexus platform will revolutionize the datacenter. Number 5 on our list is Fibre Channel Integration. Please keep watch in the coming weeks for the remainder of the Top 5 list.
Number 5: Fibre Channel Integration
Many datacenters utilize Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) to provide large quantities of storage to a multitude of servers, at a high speed. This allows for high performance data access, while centralizing storage and management. Up until now, this has required maintaining what ultimately amounts to 2 complete networks in parallel. Fibre channel SANs require fibre channel switches, and every system which needs to access the SAN requires its own fibre channel HBA and associated cabling. Essentially this means that for a single rack of servers: 2 switches are required (an ethernet switch and a fibre channel switch), 2 adapters are required for each server (an Ethernet NIC and a fibre channel HBA), and 2 cable runs are required for each server (an Ethernet cable and a fibre channel cable).
The Nexus 5000 platform supports Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) which promises to eliminate most of the administrative headache associated with FC SANs. Each server requires only a single Converged Network Adapter (CNA) which carries both fibre channel and ethernet traffic over a single UTP cable. The Nexus 5000 switch can be configured with up to 8 traditional fibre channel ports, allowing it to integrate with existing fibre channel hardware, and provide FCoE services to servers. This allows administrators to leverage their existing fibre channel hardware, without the need to support an array of dedicated FC switches and HBAs as well as continue to utilize FC storage without the additional cost associated with expanding a fibre channel network as additional servers are added. The fibre channel integration alone is no small step taken by the Nexus line of switches. It is however, only the first of several innovations.
Again, we remind you to please stay tuned for our second installment, as we continue with 5 ways the Nexus switches are going to revolutionize the datacenter.
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